Tuesday, 28 April 2015

In this excerpt from Raven's Lament, Brook
has just met Chelen and her effect on him is well...

Behind the wheel of his
rental truck, Brook threw his head back. His mind raced like white water
cascading through rapids and rifts deep in canyon walls. “What the hell just
happened back there?”

He
grabbed his journal and wrote feverishly. As a journalist he’d had to study the
literary classics in university, had even read some romance stuff on his own.
Those books all contained things that had eluded him, like the headlong rush of
emotion and hearts binding that so many authors penned. He’d always believed in
passion’s depths, of love between souls, the kind that didn’t need to link two
as one … because they always were one. A natural intimacy that merely
reacquaints one soul with another, drawing each together like flames. He just
couldn’t understand how it could be, how anything like that could possibly
exist in this age of computers and TV. Chivalry
and romance died in the last century, he’d written once. Well, maybe it
had. But maybe the notion of eternal soulmates really did exist.

An
hour later, twirling his pencil in his hand, he stared at the words he’d just
written.

Levels of awareness come at unexpected times. Sometimes, in the
unexpectedness, everything we value as precious washes away and the present
takes on a whole new meaning, grounding you from the trappings of your mind,
pulling you away from the everyday things. I’ve come here looking for answers
and have found only more questions. Why here, on the edge of the world, so far
removed from the heart of civilization as I know it? Nowhere near anything
resembling my way of life. But that’s part of it, isn’t it? To pull yourself
from daily routine and place yourself on the edge of the unknown to contemplate
… that’s where the learning comes from. It happened last time I came here and
it’s happening again, in totally unforeseen ways. So much about these islands
I’d forgotten: the lushness, the greenness of the moss, the ruddiness of the
soil from the centuries of fallen cedars. I’m excited, yet scared. So remote.
Maybe it’s the certain familiarities that haunts souls here, spirit winds.
Allowing hinges cast in civility’s rusted sterility to be flung closed to
portals of sensibility.

Brook put down his pencil
and closed his journal. Shakespearean passions, that’s what she’d awoken.
Damning emotions that drove men mad and women to swoon.

Jesus,
if she did that to him in a smile, ten minutes and a handshake, what would a
week produce?

Brook is to spend a week alone with her on a kayak
trip to see the totems of Ninstints. I wanted to show sometimes meeting
"THE ONE," can be unexpected, intimidating and shake you to your core.
Worse when you're still suffering heartbreak from the last relationship. And
worse even than that, while Brook and Chelen were investigating the downing of
the Golden Spruce tree, Brook inadvertently pocketed a strange Lapis Lazuli
rock. The rock just happens to be Raven's immortality stone. Without it, Raven
is aging rapidly. Always the trickster, he will stop at nothing, even
indomitable love, to get it back.